Bonus: Ukrainian Politics Deep Dive feat. Peter Korotaev

Hello, everybody.

We have not done one of these in a while.

And I think this is one of our only episodes, certainly our first interview expressly about Ukraine.

Today, we're joined by pretty much the perfect guest for this topic.

Peter

is joining us today.

He's behind the Substack events in Ukraine that I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this read uh peter thank you so much for joining us today thanks enough for having me on yeah i'm very excited to talk about ukraine today yeah no i i've really been looking forward to this um and i i've been reading your sub stack i don't think i have quite the mental capacity to follow everything

it is the most

there are so many fucking people involved So well, I'm going to try to, you know,

from my perspective as a mildly impaired adult, we're going to try to get people who are like me and want to understand this better.

We're going to try to get them on the right track today.

So just to get us rolling, I guess, from my outside perspective

of everything leading up to 2022 and where we're at now,

something I've always wondered is, it seems like when Zelensky won years back, he had this gigantic mandate.

Like he won by a really unbelievable margin.

And he was

pretty expressly, you know, pro-peace, like pro-Minsk, enforcing the Minsk agreement and implementing it candidate,

much to the chagrin of like Western institutions.

What accounts for his

inability to do that and everything that happened after?

He hit me with the most.

It's It's super broad.

It's super broad.

No, no, no.

I mean, it's a fascinating question.

It's kind of the most interesting question, really.

I mean, I was living in Ukraine with my family

at that time and getting really interested in politics at that time as well.

And lately, I've been trying to think about this and write about this

because it is this whole

kind of very tragic in a sense.

Why didn't it work out?

But also, I mean, it was sort of obvious he was, I mean, looking back, you can have the benefit of hindsight.

But I mean, the thing with Zelensky is, is that, sure, he banked on this whole popular frustration with nationalism and this popular desire for peace.

But first of all, he was always a very sort of, I guess you can say, naive or politically.

He was a comedian, right?

I mean, he was an actor.

He didn't have experience with politics.

And in terms of the content of his pro-peace platform,

it was very vague.

I mean, he had this famous sort of the interview that really it became clear that he was being prepared for the presidency in late 2018.

This famous interview when he famously said, like, I would speak with the devil if that's what is necessary to end the war in Ukraine.

And meaning like, you know, Putin, Putla, right?

And he also,

and he was asked, like, so how do you think you're going to talk with Putin?

He said, well, it's simple.

I'll just talk with him and tell him what we want, and he'll say what they want, and we'll come to the middle.

That's what he's his famous words back in 2018.

And so he didn't really have an understanding of, I guess, the stakes involved.

He had this idea, you know, we'll just come and talk to him.

And I'll talk with him and with Putin and it'll be fine.

And that's not really, that's not how Russia thinks.

They have a very particular demand, specific demand, which is that Ukraine,

you know, removes the part of its constitution that was was put in place after 2014 stating that Ukraine will join NATO.

So,

Ukrainian government, it put this part of the constitution that Ukraine must join NATO.

This was

2017, 18 or so.

And

Russia wants this gone.

Russia wants there to be some kind of set guarantees that Ukraine will not join NATO.

It won't be militarized.

It won't be like an Israel in Europe that's not in NATO, but still cooperates militarily and so on.

So it wasn't really a matter of coming to the middle.

You know what I mean?

So, and so there was that misconception.

But otherwise, like that, so that's the one aspect of it.

Another aspect of it is that

from especially 2020, 2021, Zelensky, all of his huge promises, you know, of ending the war and of ending corruption and ending poverty, he had all these huge election promises.

You know, they obviously didn't work out.

And there was COVID and that got people really angry and his popularity began really falling.

And there were these important regional elections, the end of 2020.

And his party lost basically all these regional elections to either the so-called pro-Russian opposition party or the sort of pro-Western nationalists.

Well, to them, not so much, but generally to some

just other parties, not his.

He got really worried.

And it's essentially he then started sanctioning all of the political opposition, both the pro-Russian, although he actually sanctioned them and the US sanctioned them and they got rid of their assets and so on.

But he also started going after the pro-Western nationalists, although in a much sort of softer way.

But what ended up happening is he had declining popularity domestically and all these polls in 2020 and 2021 showing that it was actually like his popularity was declining.

And then you had the the party pushing for peace, the so-called pro-Russian party,

Medbachuk opposition platform.

And they were coming second, third, sometimes even first in these polls.

And also the pro-Western nationalists going up.

So he had lower popularity.

And he decided to essentially make a bet.

And also, he was pissing off the oligarchs at home.

And they were doing this big coalition against him.

They were tired of him sort of centralizing power and generally just tired of him.

And he decided to make this bet on the West

that, you know, this is my last hope to stay in power.

And he started becoming more and more, you know, aggressive, anti-Russian, nationalistic.

There were these famous,

statement about maybe Ukraine will have a nuke again and so on, and all these other things.

But this was at the end, 2021.

But then the last, these are like these first two factors.

Then the last interesting factor, which is kind of the most, I don't know, the most, the sexiest, the most mysterious, is,

I mean, there's a Ukrainian oligarch, Igor Kolomoyski, who's a very famous, I think, very appealing figure, just in how sort of deranged he is.

I think a lot of Americans have heard of him as well.

I mean,

he's very, he's very clued in, like tight with Shabad.

He built this huge, is it the biggest Jewish center in Europe or the world in his hometown in Ukraine?

He was kind of close with the Trump people through Boris Epstein.

Yeah, Chabad is like a huge nexus for like either Ukrainian or

Russian or like Russian emigré oligarchs like through, and you talk about this a lot, through like sort of like the Eric Prince

UAE nexus.

Yeah, yeah, this sort of shit.

Yeah.

And Kolomoyski was like the most

is kind of the most powerful oligarch in Ukraine.

Maybe not the richest, but it was also totally unclear how rich he was because his whole empire rested on these incredibly opaque structures, this pyramid of banks and so on.

But

he was as a strange guy because, I mean, he supported the 2014 Euromaidan, you know, pro-Western, pro-NATO revolution, whatever you want to call it, because he was tired of the current president, Yanukovych, for like taking his assets, right?

And he didn't like that.

But then what happened is, and this is most of the Ukrainian oligarchs did the same thing, even those that had supported Yanukovych, they ended up turning against him because the US was threatening to sanction them and so on.

So they turned against Yanukovych in 2014.

But then by 2016, 2017, you had all of these top Ukrainian oligarchs

starting to come out in favor of rapprochement with Russia again.

And Kolomoyski was leading the charge.

He had this important interview with the New York Times as well, which came out in 2019.

But he was already saying so that it's 2016.

And even the supposedly pro-Western oligarchs, like Viktor Pinchuk, who's a very sort of...

He's like a Ukrainian Tsaros.

He funds the same things that Tsaros funds or funded.

But he actually came out in support of the Minsk agreements, these peace agreements that would return the separatist territories to Ukraine, but they would have their own political rights.

And

the liberal nationalists, they really, really hated these agreements.

We can never implement them because they would result in the strengthening of anti-NATO, pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine.

And that was not the thing they wanted.

And it would make NATO joining NATO, joining the EU impossible and so on.

But anyway, but Kolomoyski came out supporting this.

And that's also when he started deciding to push Zelensky.

Because Kolomoysk, like Zelensky is Kolomoyski's creation.

And Zelensky worked at Kolomoyski's

TV company for his whole life, OnePlus One.

And it was Kolomoyski's advertising of Zelensky in 2018 that got him the presidency.

And this was, and everyone, it's pretty obvious.

Because, I mean,

Kolomoyski was tired of the existing president taking his assets, kind of a classic story but very importantly Kolomoyski was very angry at the West because basically the West even though it sort of used his help in 2014 it quickly turned on him and it started trying to take away his business empire the Privat Bank crazy business empire the IMF would always ask for Ukraine to nationalize this bank because Kolomoyski was in charge and then the US ended up putting sanctions against him in 2021 but the important thing here is that this is where it really leads into U.S.

politics.

And hopefully I'm not sort of losing the listeners a bit too much, but is that Kolomoisky played a big role in

sort of anti-Biden, pro-Trump

activity?

Because

there were these important leaks in

Ukraine in 2020 about the burisma stuff.

Kolomoyski was in contact with Rudy Giolani

and

these were these things about Biden pressuring the Ukrainian president to get rid of the general prosecutor and so on.

It was a very big thing in Ukraine.

Yeah,

and this was this was pertaining to the investigation of Burisma, the company where Hunter Biden was on the board and he was making something like, what, like 60 grand a month, I believe, which I always thought, like, I always thought the thing about that was so interesting because people were like,

no,

there's absolutely like nothing going on there.

hunters just really knows a lot about like liquid natural gas i mean to me it was just like aren't these the sort of jobs that like the son of the shitty son of like a vice president has absolutely i mean like i think the hunter thing i mean obviously it's obvious nepotism and so on but it wasn't just the hunter thing then there were like very big issues at stake i mean what one of them was this thing where biden pressured ex-president paroshenko to fire the

general prosecutor of Ukraine because this general prosecutor was looking into the barisma stuff and also just because he wasn't compliant enough with the US sort of neoliberal plans.

And this has been a big thing.

I mean, the U.S.

has for a long, forever been engaged in this long struggle with Ukrainian sort of institutions, the court system, and so on.

But I mean, there were lots of things involved in this.

And not only that, but Kolomoyski had this big conflict with the

sort of the pro-Western

NGOs and so on

that they themselves played a huge role in the Manafort thing.

I mean, they fired the original shot in the Manafort thing in 2016 because they released this information supposedly demonstrating Manafort's, well,

his ties with different Russian, you know, old Ukrainian figures and so on.

And these were the pro-Western NGOs that had a big problem with Kolomoyski.

And then Kolomoyski, Zelensky's first presidency was seen as very dominated by Kolomoyski figures.

Like the original part of his presidency, but it was also mixed in with pro-Western figures.

It was fairly complicated.

But they started looking into

the

illegality of the 2016 Ukrainian participation in the Manafort thing.

Because the thing is, is that Ukrainian courts already in 2018-19 had shown that the Manafort stuff was essentially fake or unprovable and it was illegal for that Ukraine should, Ukrainian

organizations should not have dragged Ukraine into U.S.

politics.

It was very bad for Ukraine to get involved in this.

So anyway, so there's that whole thing.

Kolomoyski really pissed off Biden.

And when Biden came in charge, the Washington Post reported that Biden wanted Zelensky to get rid of Kolomoyski.

And

it was clear that sort of the

Ukrainian kind of of oligarchs, they wanted some kind of dotente with Russia, get trade going again.

They were scared of war, because obviously the war has destroyed their assets, totally destroyed them.

Kolomoysky is now in jail.

Zelensky put him in jail in 2023, this huge fall from this meteoric sort of rise.

And Zelensky has centralized his power so much in wartime.

So

it's this very interesting, complicated...

There was a significant sort of intrigue I guess attempt to come to some sort of agreement with Russia from the Zelensky government from Kolomoyski Kolomoysky had his people going to Moscow in 2020 2019 and the Zelensky government did restart negotiations with Russia in 2019 2020 that that previous government had cut off since essentially 2016 2017.

so

there was this attempt and then there was a lot of different

uh i mean the different pro-western ngos they did lots of protests like they had this 2019 red lines that they released nothing that could harm nato entry which obviously is the main russian demand um and then the nationalist groups they protested um

but uh there is also this kind of subterranean element of uh like klomoyski's own failure in democracy in diplomacy and his getting on the wrong side of the U.S.

administration.

It's a very interesting question.

But I mean, basically, it it was this you know nato question

and it went from there but in terms of the timing and the context it's a very interesting question

again you know very limited perspective on my part but like the trajectory of zielinski's administration and fortunes it did seem

it seemed like a pretty familiar tale in contemporary electoral politics right where there is an outsider

outsider

generally kind of like populist anti-corruption candidate who their plans are

quite vague sounding, but they're generally things that are like, you know, popular positions that

previous administrations or figures did not have like the will or the resources to implement.

And it's this sort of

I hate to be one of these people that compares everything to U.S.

politics, but sort of a similar theory to the Bernie theory of 2020, where it's like we're going to activate all the people who didn't vote before, and that will be like our base of support for these incredibly difficult things.

And usually these things end

with their ideas are too vague.

Um,

they don't really have any plans beyond that.

Uh, that was certainly what it seemed, what seemed like

happened with Zelensky.

You wrote about the negotiations starting out with prisoner exchanges, but not really going any farther than that.

And when I read those interviews that

you quoted from in those articles, yeah, it just seemed like he just had campaign talk.

The thing that's weird and I think unique to Ukraine is where it went from there.

Because usually those are like, one, if they're lucky two-term leaders or you know if they're in a parliamentary system they don't stick around for that long they go on to like write a book and do the think tank circuit depending on their alignment but weirdly enough you know here he is he's fucking still around

i guess uh

going like going from there because that was a really great explanation of kind of what happened and why i was wondering if you could give the listeners sort of an accounting of as you see it,

two of the most important factions in Ukrainian politics that you identify as sort of the granteaters,

the Sorosites,

and the more hardline nationalists.

Even though the Granteaters, of course, as you explained, are also nationalists, but the more, I guess, you know, if I were Ezra Klein, I would say a liberal types compared to the Grant Eaters.

Yeah.

I mean, so I mean, these terms, by the way, these are like not really, I didn't make them up.

No one can blame me.

This is a Ukrainian Russian term, Sarosites, Sarasyata, which sounds like piglets.

Funny joke.

Sounds really funny in Russian, in Ukrainian.

Anyway, but I mean, these are people that are funded by the, you know, International Renaissance Foundation, Open Society Foundation, which are...

George Soros.

I mean, you know, in the US, SARS is a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of a, what's it, a,

a whistle what was that phrase in english like uh whistleblower no whistleblower but it's like this guy's a nazi he says this term you know oh dog whistle dog whistle that's right but the thing is you know my family they were deep in soros money right they met with the guy a bunch of times and this is lots of political people in this part of the world.

This guy played a huge role in the political life of these countries.

So anyway, I mean, and these people are funded by these organizations.

Anyway, and also, obviously,

yeah, sorry to interrupt, but like, yeah, that is, God, I remember this sort of like uh left liberal reporter I knew made this post around like 2020 where he's like, George Soros is this amazing guy, and he's spending the twilight of his life being, you know, called all these awful things.

And it's like, yeah, I mean, okay, yeah, he isn't like the more ridiculous things that like right-wingers in America have been saying since like the 90s are obviously crazy and saying that he was like a fucking copo when he was five years old is

like incredibly stupid and awful but i'm sorry you don't make like 30 billion fucking dollars as a currency trader and you're just i just want what's best for everyone like he yeah he clearly he's very interested in global politics he has an articulated idea for what that should look like and yeah it's just it's not dog whistle to point out that it's a documented fact that he is very involved in the politics of like a lot of these countries.

Exactly.

And I mean, like, these organizations in Ukraine, I mean, they play a huge role.

I mean, as I was saying in 2019, right, Zelensky is elected and all the Sarasites, they hate Zelensky.

They think he's a Russian agent.

He's going to turn, he's going to stop Ukraine joining NATO, joining the EU.

This is awful.

And they put out this big, this document, these red lines.

So

the president cannot cross these red lines.

It's like, who are you?

You know, you're a bunch of unelected NGOs funded by foreign governments right i mean like who are you i mean it's one thing if these organizations exist sure and it's still i mean in most countries i mean not most countries actually most countries there are but in in wealthy countries and powerful countries you don't have many foreign funded organizations running around um

and uh it's one thing if they exist but if you're putting red lines on the elected president with you know 70% of the vote it's it's very strange and i mean they play a huge role i mean they've and you know they have a very simple, clear politics.

It's this hardcore economic neoliberalism, privatize everything, put us in charge of the, you know, the supervisory councils of these privatized husks of the state-owned enterprises, and we'll, you know, supervise their destruction while getting huge salaries.

This is a common career path of many Tsaristites like Sergei Lyeshenko, Stakunayem, and so on.

And

then we're going to laugh and make fun of the sort of ordinary Ukrainians who we call to be like pro-Russian Budla, which means cattle.

It's a common term by like post-Soviet liberals to refer to, you know, the majority of the population.

It's this idea, this kind of all-well, night big brother.

They're these stupid cattle who follow the communist, you know, general line and they can't be trusted with democracy, right?

Anyway, I mean, we can talk about the Tsarosites.

There's lots that can be said about the Tsarocytes,

but they're like

the most nationalist sector of Ukrainian society.

And I mean, calling them a sector of society is a little bit of a stretch, because, I mean, it's a very small portion.

It's like less than 5%, 2%, something.

Very, very small group of people.

But

who have been pumped, a lot of money has been pumped into them over the decades.

And then...

But they're the most nationalist.

And the thing is, they don't fight at the front line.

And there was this really, they don't fight in the war at all, really.

there was a famous uh law the cabinet put out late last year which actually exempted uh 133 ngos and their employees from mobilization in the war and obviously mobilization is a huge issue in ukraine you know latest news yesterday another person tried to kill himself at the mobilization office cutting his wrists with uh with a key because he got mobilized and put in this dungeon and sent to the front, right?

I mean, this happens every day.

I have my friends hiding at home for over a year, two years now, not leaving the home because they'll get mobilized and thrown to the front.

And they have to, they have no money.

He can't go to the dentist.

So he's got this awful tooth problem.

He can't go to the dentist.

You know, this is because if you go to the doctor, it's very common.

You can get mobilized there.

It's an insane, awful situation, right?

And but then you have these Sarasite thought leaders, like this guy, Vitaly Portnikov.

And he recently gave this interview saying how we can't mobilize everyone because that's feudalism.

In feudalism, you had, you know,

everyone fighting for, but in democracy, like some kind of bullshit, which is.

Yeah, he said, I, it was, I remember this because it really stuck out to me.

He said, if you want the aristocracy to die while fighting in the war, okay, well, then we'll have a feudal system.

Because that's what happens in feudalism.

But in democracy, the common man dies, which is like,

what a fucking incredible thing to say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you had this thing that gave, they exempted them from mobilization, which is kind of a funny inversion of feudalism.

Because in feudalism, the nobility had to fight.

This was kind of their purpose.

But now one Ukrainian politician called it a new nobility, but it's a paradoxical one where they're exempted from fighting.

I mean, it's also funny if you look at this list, because it was published, like this list.

And among the organizations exempted, it's Deloitte.

Their employees don't have to fight.

There's like 10 different,

there's like 10 different Deloitte forms of Deloitte that are exempted.

I wrote a big article about it, but there's a bunch of very

struggling Raytheon employees are exempted from fighting.

Kiev School of Economics, which is this hyper neoliberal,

libertarian like group of

researchers, you can call them that.

These weird biolab companies, AFL, CIO, American, Black and Veech, which is this weird biolab company.

Anyway, so they're freaks.

They're awful.

They don't fight in the war and they always have scandals about them avoiding service.

But they also want the war to continue forever because

without Ukraine being this NATO frontline state, they're not going to get any funding, right?

That's the whole purpose.

That's the reason why they get funding.

And they don't have to face the risks of fighting.

And they also have a, you know, I mean, they are very, they play very important roles in the Ukrainian government.

No, they don't play important roles, but they occupy important posts in the Ukrainian government.

Like Sergei Leshenko, who was the guy who published the original stuff about Manafort back in 2016, which led to the whole Manafort saga, he's actually Zelensky's top, one of Zelensky's top advisors, official advisors.

which is another reason why Trump obviously isn't very well disposed towards Zelensky.

This is this, this, like Rudy Giolani really hates this guy, for instance.

He had lots of statements.

Like, Leshenko is the worst guy in the world.

Anyway, but

then you also have the Azov people.

I mean, I wouldn't say that Azov is one of the most, I mean, it's there's kind of a lot of factions in Ukrainian politics.

It's kind of, it's kind of crazy.

It's kind of, it's kind of crazy.

I mean, lots of countries, I guess, but Ukraine in particular, it's very exciting.

Lots of things going on.

The Azov guys are definitely powerful and influential, but often they do, I think think they

may exaggerate.

I mean, like, because they're obviously also working with other influential forces in Ukrainian politics.

But anyway, but the Azov guys, these are the classic, you know, Ukrainian nationalist, neo-Nazi, pagan, they're all kinds of freaky stuff people fighting in the army.

And

they've become huge in wartime.

They've now just announced that they're moving to a core.

They were previously like a battalion of Gaguber brigades, but now they've unified into this huge, larger structure, and they've been recently given a lot more control of the front lines.

And they're considered to be, you know, the most effective fighters in the army.

And they always drum this up.

And they have huge PR support, so much, you know, military, like they had the best weapons, the best training, and everyone wants to join them.

I mean, if you want to join the army, then you want to join Azov.

And I know people that ended up joining Azov that I used to fucking go out and drink with and get fucked up with, but now they're in Azov.

It's got lots of hipsters go there it's because you know if you have money you go there uh but they're freaks right i mean they're you know they're in the real esoteric pagan nazi and all that the um yeah that's that's interesting you said like hipsters doing it yeah is it like is that like is it sort of like a i don't know like a middle class adventurism or like it's sort of like a coming of age thing like the it's I don't know.

That is, this is more of like a war on terror thing, but that was a phenomenon that you would see in America.

Middle-class strivers enlisted and not just enlisting or joining as officers, but like trying to join more elite units like Rangers.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I sort of talked with or did like interviews with different right-wing, like neo-Nazi sort of people back in Ukraine.

And almost all of them, they're like coders and so.

And coders is a very, it isn't, I don't know, I think in the U.S., it's not so much of the thing, but in Eastern Europe, coders are this really important so class in society because they earn way more than everyone else and they work for foreign companies and they earn just huge amounts more than everyone else but also they're not actually rich enough to actually move to western europe you know uh yeah um because ukrainian wages so much lower and so on and um so they have this complicated they simultaneously kind of hate the rest of society they think they're a bunch of ignorant losers and sort of uh idiots right uh stupid working class

what's it, tattoo, right?

But they also, and they want, and they love the West, they want to go to the West, but they kind of can't go there, so they have kind of a bit of an identity issue.

But in general, yeah, it is this Azov is the striving, they're really sexy, you know, they have, they've made an anime now, they have like some anime guy.

Oh my God, everyone has fucking anime now in the 2020s.

They make these really slick ads that are like two-minute anime mini-movies and stuff.

But they just, they do have, and I met this random guy who, who joined us.

He wasn't a hipster.

He was just a random sort of poor countryside guy, but he left because he got freaked out seeing dead people and so on.

So this is before the, before 2020 monitor.

But it is this driving thing.

I remember like, you know, I talked with this other Nazi coder guy and he was like, you know, many of us are coders.

We're trying to find ourselves, realize ourselves in life.

And I mean, they came out of also like football hooligan scene, which is also this kind of subcultury,

I guess, like middle class revolt type thing, you know, very like also anarchist symbolism that then gets converted, like anti-government, but then life, you know.

Anyway,

it's interesting.

But the last thing about the Azog guys is just that they more and more are actually coming out in favor of a ceasefire, which is quite interesting because...

they are worried that because I mean they're also the ones dying and fighting in the war unlike the Sarosak type people.

But they also, you know, are in the army and they can see that the, you know, Ukraine army is losing territory, but they're very worried the Ukrainian army is kind of just going to collapse, essentially, of this disorganization.

Or just in the long term, that the Russian army will win.

And also they worry about the growth of pro-Russian sentiments.

I sort of translate lots of this, they're like analytical stuff that I translate on my sub stack, where

they worry that this hardcore, forever, endless war, mobilization, poverty is just going to is increasing pro-Russian sentiment in Ukrainian society.

And then that just, you know, the whole project will fail.

So lots of them are calling for a ceasefire and they're very actively criticizing the Tsarov people, obviously saying the Tsarovs people are like, you know, LGBT, blah, blah.

But just also that you guys are totally irresponsible and you don't, you're dooming our state.

So that's an interesting conflict that's going on.

And the Azov people are definitely sort of allied with other forces as well.

And we can also talk about different sort of intrigues that, well,

they're probably trying to talk with the Trump and different other figures in the Ukrainian political world that are definitely talking with Trump.

They're also close, but as of so that's that's definitely a possibility that if they worry that Zelensky and the Soros people, who are kind of more and more closer, even though just because they both share a need for forever war, even though they sort of hate each other in many other ways, but in that sense, they agree, then the logical sort of replacement would be some sort of coalition of, you know, Azov patriotic young officers and then some older figures from the political sphere that have also been in contact with Trump and some newer figures.

We can talk about that as well.

It's happening right now.

It's interesting.

But anything else?

Before we get into that, I really want to get into the deal and what the future looks like.

But the last

one or two things I wanted to talk about before that were

the final,

I mean, as you said, there are a billion factions and subfactions, but one of the most interesting influential factions that you talked about, sort of as,

you know, going over the main forces, both during Zelensky's rise and now, were the oligarchs that in Western media are identified as pro-Russia.

And you make this point that it isn't always or even usually that someone is pro-Russia in Ukraine.

It's that they either,

you know, by taking a sober look at things or because of their vested interests, such as these oligarchs that you're talking about, realize that a war would mean

obviously hundreds of thousands of dead.

For the the oligarchs, it would mean that

their interests, especially the

ones that have interests in, you know,

rare metals or

metallurgical concerns,

that it would be extremely deleterious to their interests.

If you could talk a little bit about that and also

I'm sorry, this is so broad, but like the other thing that I found incredibly interesting was you talked a lot about um ukrainian industries that were there were sort of vestiges of like either old soviet design bureaus or state-owned companies uh the the newer ones that were sort of like ripped apart and like forbidden from doing business with russia who would kind of be like their obvious main customer for for um

you know military aviation which was

Ukraine had a lot of potential for a pretty big military aviation industry.

I was wondering if, I guess, like after all of this, what would be left?

Like who, what could they do business with?

And what is left for that oligarch faction that you talked about now after all this?

Yeah, I mean, so the...

So the second question is that, I mean, Ukraine was, in a sense, like the most highly industrialized part of the Soviet Union.

And

the most advanced technological, like most technologically advanced parts of the Soviet

supply chain were in Ukraine, in eastern Ukraine, particularly in the city of Nipropetrovsk, which is where Kolomoysky is from and the area where Zelensky is from as well.

And you had factories like

Motorsic, which is in that area as well, not in that particular city,

which was a very important aviation aeronautics factory, over 100 years old, played a huge role in like the first Soviet helicopters and the first helicopters in the world as well

in World War I.

Anyway, incredibly important factory.

And Russia actually depended on it in the post-Soviet world

for its own helicopters and planes, which was sort of a problem for Russia.

Russia tried to sort of diversify away from that in the 2000s because they realized that Ukraine was going down this pro-Western path and it would not really be possible to depend on them for this.

But still, Russia was their main

partner for this.

And then, and the owner of this factory was quite positive, like pro-Russian, positive for

trade integration with Russia.

But it's also, he also had his limits.

He also criticized Russia for

basically trade competition with him.

So it's always with these Ukrainian businessmen,

none of them are really ideologically

aligned with Russia or whatever.

And throughout the 2000s period, they actually,

even though they were seen as pro-Russian by the pro-Western opposition, they actually crushed like, you know, idealistically pro-Russian people in eastern Ukraine that had their own, you know, little organizations and so on.

They got put down because they, you know, these oligarchs, they didn't like competition and other reasons as well.

And they also just didn't want to become part of Russia because if they're part of Russia, then they have to compete with the Russian businessmen, which are bigger than them.

So they never really wanted that.

They just wanted to continue trading with Russia.

But then when 2014, the Euromaidan moving towards the EU and cutting off trade with Russia and this war in the East and so on.

And because of this, like Motorsic, like their sales fell by 40%.

And the factory ended this long period of crisis.

And then the Chinese tried to get it.

And then the Trump administration blocked that.

Eric Prince tried to get it.

It's a big story.

But in wartime, this factory's been bombed many times by the Russians because obviously it's a military industrial factory.

It's kind of what number one target in a war.

But just in general, I mean, I have these sort of statistics

I can read out quickly about sort of Ukraine, it really de-industrialized very significantly.

I mean, throughout the post-Soviet period, but in particular after 2014, when

the Euramadan won and the whole aim was to sign this free trade agreement with the EU, which was a very one-sided one, kind of, you know, similar kind of NAFTA type stuff, although, you know, I mean, sort of from a Mexican perspective, but really much worse, because in fact, the free trade agreement with that Ukraine signed with the EU, it didn't really allow any industrial exports by Ukraine to the EU, because they had to comply to these very stringent

EU,

like, you know,

health, you know, all these different requirements.

And I mean, for military aviation, there's no chance that

the fucking EU, like that Dassault or Dassault.

Yeah.

I'm never going to try to pronounce anything ever.

Fuck them.

Fuck the French.

Fucking killed.

But yeah, I mean, any of any of the big Western European existing defense contractors.

That was the, yeah, that was the big thing that I thought.

Like, they're never going to, like,

even

what's left of Antonov, they would never let that.

Yeah.

No, and it, like, the whole factory just collapsed.

Antonov factory actually became like an Azov base, which was pretty crazy.

I had like a garage around there, and I'd always

run around, doesn't it?

It was, it was real freaky.

Uh, yeah, but uh, it was just kind of collapsing this big Azov sign there and stuff.

But I mean, what happened was that the, like, for instance, like the GDP, the just the share of the industrial of industrial production just kept on falling.

It fell by 4% from

2012, 2019.

And these statistics, I mean, like, for instance, like

automobile production, it was a third of its 20, 12 level in 2019.

So it fell by three times.

Same with train wagons and

metallurgical production.

They all had these huge falls.

There were all these, you know, domestic exports of aerospace production declined by five times times over the five-year period in 2013, 2019, six-year period.

Train wagons fell by exports fell by 7.5 times.

So these huge falls in the most industrially advanced sections of the Ukrainian economy.

There were all these big car factories and the huge car factory in Zaporizhia just collapsed.

It doesn't exist anymore, really.

And instead, Ukraine became this agricultural exporter to the EU.

But even then, they couldn't even export that much of, there were these strict quotas in in the EU free trade agreement, which meant that beyond the quotas, the tariffs would come back.

So it was a very like disadvantageous agreement that the EU signed with Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government occasionally tried to renegotiate it and it would just always fail.

The EU just told them, no, we don't need to.

In wartime, the restrictions got loosened significantly, even removed.

But obviously, I mean, it's wartime and Ukraine couldn't really produce much at all anyway.

And then even then, the EU farmers, they had all big protests against it, and it's in the process.

Lots of the restrictions were like came back and so on.

But

like the Zelensky government at the beginning tried to actually introduce some protectionist measures to save industry.

But this was actually vetoed by the SARS side, different NGOs, also the EU and the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce.

They vetoed it.

Because, I mean, Ukraine's state purchases, 40% of them are from foreign companies, which is a huge, huge amount compared to like the US, the EU, where it's 2% to 5%.

Um, but then you had these neoliberal NGOs that just blocked it.

So I guess that's the situation.

I mean, yeah, in the future, there's not, there's very, very little to no hope for the industrial complex.

And well, it's one of the ironic things where it's like, you know, Ukraine was positioned as this anti,

you know, Russian military sort of spearhead that was going to fight against Russia and ended up fighting against Russia.

But its military industrial base was eroded over this period by the same Western forces that were preparing it for this role.

And in wartime,

they haven't been able to set up, for instance, a shell factory.

Lots of the Azov telegrams complain about this a lot.

Why don't we have a single shell factory in Ukraine?

They can make drones, but these are small, quite technologically basic items in small little garages and small different other locations around the country.

And they are making quite a few of them, but still much less than the Russians are making with their drones.

And then I think your first question was about the the oligarch i mean the oligarchs right like their position

yeah the the the oligarchs felt like you know they would be labeled as pro-russian in western media but that really they were just they wanted to prevent a war at all costs and wanted the implementation of minks and like however politically like fractious that environment would be it would be much better than this yeah i mean like they have all lost billions of dollars according to like you know washington post like yakmiatov the richest guy in Ukraine, he just lost billions of dollars.

His own fortune was only like

6 billion.

Now it's like 2 or 3 billion.

His factories were the key sort of points of the war, like Azov Style in Mariupol.

That was his factory, one of his biggest assets.

But anyway, I mean, so they've lost a lot, but it is also, I mean, they did also, they were in pretty deep with the Atlanticists as well.

I mean,

Akhmiatov and Pinchuk, this other big oligarch, who also called, Pinchuk also called called for some kind of Minsk implementation in 2016, for which he was criticized heavily by

the NGO people and liberal nationalists.

But I mean, they're some of the biggest funders of the Atlantic Council, which is this very important, like ultra-Atlanticist Washington-headquartered think tank,

which is, you know,

we can talk about Atlantic Council as well.

It's a pretty interesting topic with its sponsors and so on.

But they're like incredibly hawkish and so on about confronting Russia and blah, blah.

So, I mean, these guys, Akhmetov and Pinchuk, they were, who are the richest guys in the country,

they sort of tried to play both sides.

And it did seem like possible that maybe the U.S.

would force Ukraine to implement Minsk in the pre-2022 period.

This was actually even in 2022 in January.

And in late 2021, there was this huge like paranoia in Ukraine by the Ukrainian government and by the liberal nationalists that Biden would force Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements in order to focus on China and like you know come to agreement with Russia.

I mean I hope that would be the case as well.

But it became clear that that was not going to happen.

But so those oligarchs,

their power has been very much eroded in wartime anyway, but they still have plenty of power for sure.

The Zelensky group has emerged.

There's this new

sort of power vertical, although I think as well, like the days are fairly numbered.

It's hard to see them surviving much longer.

But Kolomoisky is in jail, but he's still scheming very much.

He came out with an announcement.

Like now that Trump's back, he has lots of hopes that he's going to be able to sort of return.

And

the thing is that this is also a really important factor in Zelensky being really worried about a ceasefire because

You know, this is, I mean, it's kind of getting into the current talks and so on.

But I mean, what russia wants and uh and what trump is also saying he wants is for there to be elections in ukraine uh obviously a cease like an end to military hostilities and some kind of even you know long-term peace in ukraine and elections to replace zelensky and the reason that zelensky really fears this other than you know obviously it's nice nice to be in power but um I mean, as I was saying before, his whole, like in 2021, his popularity fell, but then he relied on the West to be as this sort of anti-Russian warrior and so on.

And he was able to continue being president, even though his popularity became very low.

But then in the wartime, it became higher at the beginning.

But then also, I mean, his legitimacy by the constitution ended in May of 2024.

That was when his second term ended.

And in the Ukrainian constitution, you can't have more than two terms.

But more importantly, he's pissed off Kolomoyski so much.

i mean like kolomoyski is a really serious guy i mean like let me let me just read this one this great kind of quote that i found from this other ukrainian politician who lived in the same city as kolomoyski he has this great thing about kolomoyski says i don't know how this will end kolomoyski has a saying he likes to repeat life is like a supermarket you walk through pick the most beautiful things try them load up your cart and enjoy them.

But at the end of the road, there's a checkout counter and you have to pay for everything you took.

That's the Kolomoysky line.

But then this guy that knew Kolomoyski, he says, I know that Kolomoyski has a personal cemetery in Dyper Petrovsk, his home city, full of people whose businesses were seized by him and who were killed.

If you gather them all, you have an entire graveyard.

So, I mean, like,

he tried to assassinate like the head of the Ukrainian National Bank in 2018.

That was a big thing.

He's killed a lot of people.

This guy has a shock tank.

I just want to make this clear.

This guy had a shock tank.

Like in his office, Kolomoysky had this tank with shocks swimming around it.

This is in the New York Post article about him.

So this is a really serious guy.

He's a very funny guy.

He's quite Trumpian in a much more sort of crazy, chaotic, evil way.

He had this great joke, for instance, where it's unconstitutional in Ukraine to have more than one citizenship.

And he has two.

Everyone knows that he has Ukrainian and Israeli.

But then he was

asked about this by a journalist and he had this great laugh.

And he says, well, look, actually, I have three citizenships.

I have Cypriot, Israeli, and Ukrainian.

And there's no law against having three citizenships in the Ukrainian constitution.

That is a very Trump line.

Exactly.

I mean, he's got so many zingers.

He's an endless source of entertainment.

But he's a very, very, very serious guy.

And you know what?

And Zelensky has taken all of his businesses, put them in jail.

Right.

It's crazy.

And so, and Zelensky in general has

really kind of a bit of a so much extortion in wartime.

I mean, this was so many businesses are really complaining about how just constant either you pay the rent or you get accused of being supporting Russia, of being a Russian agent and so on of financing terrorism.

Kolomoysky's business partner, Bogolyubov, who escaped to the EU, he stated in an interview that the government in Ukraine demanded he pay $100 million or he go to jail, that he managed to escape.

So, I mean, like, Zelensky has so many enemies, more enemies than it's possibly imaginable.

Already in 2021, all the oligarchs were against him.

And now they just hate him.

So he is very worried about his personal safety.

And this is a big...

And if there was democracy,

you know, elections, he would be in serious, serious danger.

So

I guess hopefully that sort of answers your question.

Maybe it didn't.

Yeah.

I want to get into the Atlantic Council and just sort of like the Western forces as they relate to all these factions.

Something that's so interesting to me about this is,

you know, initially I

made this offhanded remark that a lot of Western interplay with Ukrainian factions and

industry is sort of, it seems almost like they formalized and codified a lot of, you know, what similar groups did in Russia in the 90s.

But really like, you know, not to say what happened there was necessarily lesser or okay

but at least when the same western forces were doing this in the 90s in russia they were looting all these companies and looting all these former state concerns but with the implicit understanding that they would own like a part of an aluminum company or a weapons manufacturer or or something basically that these things things would exist.

In Ukraine, it's just anything that could possibly compete with any of these sort of state-champion EU companies is just purposely let to rot or taken apart.

And anything that survives is, you know, to be carved up and given to, you know, an Eric Prince type, possibly.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's like

kind of worse and like more cynical than Russia in the 90s, actually.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, Russia also, you know, de-industrialized massively in that time.

But I think that I do agree with you in that what's happened in Ukraine is they've been able to sort of get in charge of the state a lot more than in Russia.

And this has been a really long-term process.

I mean, for decades with the U.S., Canada and the EU sponsoring all these different, well, these NGOs, a very long project with them marching through the institutions in cultural institutions, but then also in the court system.

This has been ongoing for decades, getting all these different court observers, pollsters, which then played a huge role in all these different kind of, you know, revolutions, quote unquote, but also all these different supervisory councils, ethics committees, like for instance, of the of the courts, of the judges.

There's this big thing in the past couple of years under Zelensky that was put through under huge opposition from Ukraine's court system that put the supervisory council, which has to be minimum half foreigners.

And right now there's like a Lithuanian and a Texan guy and some other,

I think a Brussels person or something, who has the deciding vote in choosing Ukrainian judges, right, for the future.

And this is huge because, I mean, often, and these guys, the old Ukrainian court system, which still exists, like these court figures, they'll often kind of do things like declare that the privatization of agricultural land is unconstitutional.

That was a big scandal.

And

the pro-Western people are really angry about that.

Or they'll declare that like these anti-corruption organizations that were set up by the US in Ukraine in 2014, 15, that they're unconstitutional, which is true because they have all these

rights, which are not,

there's no place in the constitution for these weird organizations, anti-corruption institutions that can gather info on any politician and that can send them to jail and can investigate them and so on and so on.

They're outside of the purview of the Supreme Court and so on.

So anyway, so

that's a big thing really, where they've been able to really put the state machinery under their control, get their people in really high places.

And not just people that are like sympathetic to liberalization or whatever, but people that just straight up were educated in the U.S.

and that will work their whole lives in U.S.-funded NGOs.

Like that didn't really happen as much in Russia.

You had pro-liberalization people like

Gaidar

and so on.

But these were people from kind of the Soviet, I guess, from the Soviet era.

And lots of them ended up cooperating with Putin anyway.

Some of them were even still in the Russian government.

Some of them left at 2022.

But then in Ukraine, you have this new class that was created of, you know, so-called Tsarosites and so on that are really, and just foreigners that have these important posts in these different yeah in these different countries so I do think it is different for sure and maybe we could talk about Atlantic Council a bit yeah yeah I definitely want to get into that

yeah could you talk a little bit or however much about how

I guess their Ukraine business you would call it got rolling

and I am kind of interested in the future of it.

Yeah, I mean, like, I guess that those, there were two,

there's like, I guess three interesting sort of little

things.

The thing, I guess, to make clear is that that this would happen was known a long time ago, right?

That there would be this big war and so on.

I mean, there was this famous declassified, well, not declassified, WikiLeaks released of this 2008

letter from William Burns, who is the U.S.

ambassador.

to Russia at the time.

And he stated that, you know, if Ukraine joins NATO, Russia will view this expansion as a military threat.

And all sections of the Russian establishment agree on this and that there could be war, Russia would have to intervene and so on.

And he advised against any sort of moves towards Ukraine joining NATO, which were precisely beginning at that time, 2008, by, you know, there's the joint, like the conference and so on in

Munich, as they were called.

But then you also had like this interest, interesting another thing that's often brought up, which is quite interesting reading, is this 2019 RAND report called Extending Russia, Competing from Advantageous Ground.

And there's this whole chapter there about

like the main geopolitical measure that they see is providing lethal aid to Ukraine.

And I mean, they say some pretty interesting things there.

Like one of the big things they talk about is how It's difficult to separate Europe from Russia.

And they say that reducing European peacetime consumption of Russian gas has a median to low likelihood of success.

And I think the key word here is peacetime, right?

Because in wartime,

that has been possible.

Although, I mean, Europe still consumes quite a lot of Russian gas, but still,

they got the Europeans to put through sanctions on, well, to stop using Nord Stream 2.

And then also it got destroyed, obviously.

And this was also one of the sort of key tensions in 2021, where Nord Stream was finished around that time and then there was this big thing of how will the US respond are they gonna let it exist it seemed like they just let it exist but this has been a really long-term American key policy goal of you know this whole idea of the Eurasian right land mass we can't let Russia and Europe link up if that happens then there's no more need Europe won't need the US anymore what role will the US have in the world and you know and you had in the 80s, you had,

you know, Reagan fighting against European-Russian gas expansion, right?

You also had a strange explosion as well of Russian gas infrastructure that some linked to the U.S.

government back in the 80s.

So, I mean, and this Rand document actually brings this up.

They say that

the Reagan attempt to stop it.

So like this policy would require both planning to make sure that it's efficient as possible and cost sharing to make sure that all countries would benefit and would also have an incentive to participate.

Because the problem was that

the most important flaw is that new non-Russian gas supplies for Europe would be more expensive than continuing to purchase Russian pipeline gas.

But in wartime, the Europeans have been forced to buy this more expensive American gas.

But the whole thing is if the war ends, then that'll stop.

So, I mean, and that's been a major, you know, we often see this often discussion of like, to what extent has the war in Ukraine been beneficial for the U.S.

government, the U.S.

sort of state interests?

And in this respect, it was successful, right?

I mean, it got them to switch to the American gas.

It got them to cut off so many ties with Russia and depend on the U.S.

so much more.

And maybe I think there's this extent to which the American government was just worried that if we let this continue any further,

then it's over, then that they'll just be really reintegrating with Russia, just as the Ukrainian business elite wanted to do that.

But they also say in this report that increasing military aid would certainly drive up the Russian cost, but doing so could also increase the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a

disadvantageous peace settlement.

This would generally be seen as a serious setback for US policy.

So, I mean, it was fairly obvious the cost as well.

And they compared it to Afghanistan, how that was great.

This would be great as well.

But anyway, I mean, so that was foreseen quite in many ways.

And also, if you look at Ukrainian media, they were predicting it as well.

Back in 2019, Zelensky's top advisor, Aristovich, he stated that there would definitely be a war with Russia in 2020 to 2022 unless Ukraine gave up NATO admission.

So, I mean, this was, it was, it was clear.

Then you have Atlantic Council.

We get to Atlantic Council, which is this very influential

think tank.

centered in Washington.

Atlantic Council, it was set up in 61

as this obviously, you know, pro-NATO

think tank.

But in terms of the funders,

they publish their funders every year.

Their biggest government funder is actually the UK, not the US, which is interesting.

And I think that does point to this whole sort of Atlanticist special, what's it, you know, special agreement, a special relationship where

the UK is particularly interested in keeping the US involved in European affairs, if we put it that way.

And the UK wants to sort of reclaim this lost kind of imperial power that it had,

this whole Russian kind of obsession, and

trying to keep the US involved.

But some other funders, according to the website, is Ukrainian businessman Rinat Akhmiatov, Viktor Pinchuk, Raytheon, Amazon, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, Open Society Foundation of Albania, also the Open Society Foundation in general, Walmart, Lithuania, Estonia, Australian foreign intelligence, Elbit Systems,

Israeli military intelligence.

Famous Israeli names.

Palo Alto Networks, which is this weird sort of tech military-industrial thing.

Penguin Random House, OMID YAR Network, AGC Global Jewish Advocacy, US State Department, Palantir.

Google, Airbus, Rockefeller Foundation, UAE, UK Foreign Service, Goldman Sachs,

ExxonMobil, Department of Defense, American, Apple, Tellurian, which is a US LNG company, natural gas, which is obviously competing with rational energy, Tales, which is the sub-military industrial company, NATO.

My favorite one, though, is that Romania donated, but it was under $1,000.

What's even the point then?

Like,

did they buy a coffee in the lobby?

Yeah, and there's this section because they divide the funding by how much they donated and you know above a million dollars below you know you know below a hundred thousand and then there's the section below a thousand dollars and all of the people here it's just individuals right like alex jones or that you know and then there's romania government of romania

which is the only sort of non-individual on this huge list of um anybody so funny

I yeah, I first,

I first sort of not caught wind of them, but sort of,

I don't, I don't know, started paying more attention to them during the Syrian Civil War, especially around like 2014, because they were, do you remember this guy, Mike Morell,

former CIA director, who was a big like Hillary 2016 figure?

He's like, you know, a think tank picture, and he would be on like shows like Charlie Rose pre-cancellation.

And he's, obviously, he's done some TV about Ukraine, though Syria is more of his area of interest.

But I remember seeing this

interview with him in 2014 where he said, we need to directly be killing as many Russians as possible in Syria.

And I thought, what a fucking maniac.

And the more I kept digging, the more I kept seeing, like, you know, him showing up at Atlantic Council things.

And lo and behold, like everyone where I would see them saying something just fucking psychotic about Syria like a white guy who was born in fucking New Hampshire who is like a he was raised Catholic and he's agnostic now and he is saying the most like

vile like

insane ethno-religious invective against Shia Muslims I've ever heard yeah that all like Atlantic Council people like a really fucking incredible body of work.

They're crazy.

I mean, they're crazy.

I mean, they have also, they've set up a new China, China Institute.

So they're branching out in that respect.

I mean, they're very influential.

I mean, this is an interesting sort of, I mean, one that before the influential bit, I also want to just say that they're huge on disinfo, like anti-disinfo shit, right?

And this is actually on their website.

They say that our largest government donor is the United Kingdom, which supports our work studying and exposing disinformation, among other issues.

So they see it as one of their key goals.

And I mean, this is this whole,

you know, 2016 Trump sort of obsession, right?

This is a whole other track that's also very interesting to talk about with all these anti-disinfo organizations that were set up often in Ukraine, and then they spread out to the US.

And then, as I said, like these anti-corruption organizations set up

in Ukraine by the US, they were the ones that publicized the Manafort stuff, which ended up also being kind of not actually provable in Ukrainian courts.

Anyway, so that's a whole one of their big tracks.

But I mean, they're also really influential.

I mean, for instance, James L.

Jones was the chairman of Atlantic Council, and he stepped down in 2009 to serve as President Obama's national security advisor.

And then, you know, Susan Rice was ambassador to the UN.

She also was a member of the Atlantic Council.

Richard Holbrook.

a special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrook is an all-star.

Yeah.

You know, he is he is deep state first scheme all-star yeah and general eric uh shinseki and marie slaughter director of policy planning and state department at the state department hegel ended up serving as secretary of defense uh general brent uh scowcroft served as chairman of the you know and then he ended up being ambassador to china wait brent scowcroft uh brett scowcroft yeah so he served as interim chairman of the organization's board of directors until 2014 until former ambassador to china and governor of utah john huntsman was appointed to this position sorry i've always liked scowcroft as a bush one figure so it it caught my ear yeah and i mean uh there's a there's a huge and they are they are they have lots of also interesting scandals in terms of lobbying i mean they uh they lobby they lobbed they produced a report promoting the transatlantic trade and investment partnership between the eu and the us with the financial backing of fedex that was simultaneously lobbying congress to decrease tariffs between the US and the EU.

They also had this big

scandal above

Chevron and ExxonMobil,

who were both sponsors of Atlantic Council, in terms of undermining the Brazilian legislative proposals to give Petrobras, you know, pre-salt deposits in the Brazilian coast.

So, anyway, and also with the Arab world, they're sponsored by this guy.

Maybe you know this guy, the better, Baja Hariri, who's the brother of,

yeah yeah yeah of yeah no of the of the beloved hariri family yeah exactly yeah and brother brother brother of the world's most kidnapped prime minister exactly and i mean there was i mean also barisma funds land council this is one of the official uh

they donated a hundred thousand every year for three years from 2016 onwards but there was this there was this big thing when um

like basically hariri got them to get rid of someone that was too like not not militaristic enough about the Middle East.

Anyway, so they're a real piece of work.

They're incredibly, obviously, always going for no ceasefire, war forever.

They were incredibly pessimistic about Zelensky as well.

When Zelensky was running in the elections, they had all these things like, oh my God, Zelensky is a Russian agent and blue world.

And in his first, the first period of his time, they were very worried.

Like, is he going to reach out to Russia?

And he's going to start, you know, peace in Ukraine.

This could never happen.

But then they became more optimistic about him.

And now, now, obviously, they're quite happy for him to stay in there.

But they're very much allied with the sort of the Saro-site wing, Ukrainian politics.

Lots of these big figures write for them quite often, like Sergei Leshenko, other people,

NGO circuit.

So, yeah, play the council.

What a piece of water.

So, you've written extensively about how Zelensky,

in sort of his efforts to salvage his presidency and

forces that ended up being aligned with Zelensky, they made this calculation that

it would be better to align themselves with the Democratic Party at first.

And now that that is coming back to bite them in a huge way.

It's always very interesting to me when people make those calculations of who they think is like inevitable in American politics or if it's just a gamble.

But now, obviously, they,

this was an incredibly poor choice to make.

It augur incredibly poorly for his political future and possibly Ukraine at large.

I was wondering if you could give a outline about

what may be on the horizon for a settlement administered by Trump, who is sort of on deck next, because

that would probably be the end of Zelensky.

And

what do things look like after whatever horrible deal we impose on them.

Yeah, I mean, well, you know, it's kind of funny because, I mean, I

find it a little bit depressing about how Trump right now,

this is probably the only kind of cool thing he's doing.

I'll be honest, right?

With in terms of trying to end the war in Ukraine in this just really stupid war, right?

I mean, Biden from the beginning, he was clear that Ukraine's not going to join NATO.

He would say that, oh, Ukraine has to have the door open, but they can't really join right now because they have some serious corruption issues.

Which was in Ukraine, people, you pro-Western people, would point out, like, you know, what about fucking Albania, right?

Which has

been in NATO since 2009.

This is, you know,

it's not a fucking real country.

I mean, let's be real.

And it's way more unhinged than Ukraine.

Ukraine's unhinged as well.

But it was obvious that they just didn't want Ukraine in NATO and they were happy to refuse Russia's demands for a written refusal or a written closed doors policy for Ukraine.

They didn't want to admit to that.

That would be seen as weakness and so on.

And they wanted Russia to sort of get involved in some kind of what they saw as a weakening exercise for Russia.

But they weren't going to let Ukraine join NATO anyway.

So it was just a very obvious leaving Ukraine out to dry and suffer all the consequences, which didn't achieve the goals of, you know, destroying the Russian army and so on.

And now Trump seems that he wants to end this war.

Maybe his own ambitions, Nobel and whatever, maybe he wants to pivot to China, who knows.

But I just find it just really depressing, right?

How in the US, among the sort of liberal media and lots of, you know, left-wing media, this is framed as, oh my God, Trump.

This is awful.

Bernie Sanders, we need to protest this, right?

This is good right like i mean you can you can hate trump and trump is obviously this you know all these elon trump all these things you know what they want for america for the american society is unenviable and uh but in terms of ukraine this is not a bad thing right if elections come to ukraine if there's right an end to the war in ukraine if my if people in ukraine can go outside like men i will be able to go outside right it's a situation where people get shot at the border for trying to escape ukraine right it's it's crazy It's crazy.

And

if people, if, you know, there are people in Ukraine that want to fight Russia, right?

They want to.

But I will note that like when there was the mobilization law in 2024,

six million people did not enter their details.

Only 4 million people did, right?

To join the army by the deadline.

And of those 4 million, many had medical conditions that would allow them not to serve.

Although then those medical conditions

made them viable to serve.

And now you can have tuberculosis and HIV and still serve in the army.

It's a bit of a big issue.

But what I mean is,

most Ukrainian men do not want to serve in the army.

And they demonstrated this by not putting their details up to serve, right?

But in a just situation, they would be able to leave.

And the people that wanted to serve in the army, they could stay and they could fight as much as they wanted to, right?

But that's not how it is.

People get shot and killed on the border.

They're trying to escape.

Or they die

in the river, drowning in the the river.

They die hiking over the mountains.

This is a huge genre of like YouTube videos.

Um, people explain how to, you know, hike through the Carpathian mountains to get to Romania while you're being, you know, watched by drones and possibly shot by border guards, by Ukrainian border guards, not by Romanian, by Ukrainian ones, to prevent them from leaving.

Anyway, so I mean, I find it kind of crazy how this is this is framed as you know, a bad,

yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, with Bernie specifically, it is fucking incredible after everything I saw him do for the first like 15 or 16 months of the Israeli genocide to,

you know, take umbrage with this.

Yeah.

But I do, I do think the worry with a lot of people, both on the left liberal side and the more explicitly left wing side is, you know, A,

to say the least, Trump's foreign policy is

kind of all over the place, right?

One moment it looks like, you know, we'll use Israel for an example.

One moment it looks like they are taking this sort of like Bush, like George H.W.

Bush or Reagan approach where, okay, we're going to treat Israel like any other American ally.

And even if that drives them fucking crazy, we're not going to let them dictate these terms, et cetera, et cetera.

And then

whoever is

in the admin who has that point of view, Miriam will make a call and they're fucking out of there.

And then they're doing X, Y, and Z fucking insane thing, either on a domestic front as it relates to Israel or just

something with weapons sales or escalating with Ansarullah.

So who knows?

I mean, as you pointed out, things with Russia and Ukraine got...

shittier under Trump one and he's he for while doing this he bragged about being the first first guy to give them lethal weapons.

And the other the other thing is, too, I mean, people have pointed out that his mineral extraction thing makes no fucking sense as far as the realities of mineral extraction go.

But it is,

you know, you do generally worry, like,

what other awful thing could be done to them.

For sure.

I mean, like, look, from my, in my perspective i think as long as the border is open and mobilization this was actually one you know putin's essentially demand now is that he's fine with a ceasefire as long as mobilization ends in ukraine at that time and uh and the general trump putin thing is they want there to be elections in ukraine democratization and so on and this would uh put in peril the nationalist militarist forces because people are very tired of this according to every paul in Ukraine is that people are very very tired of the war and of mobilization

and they would like

an end to that and so I mean that's the and I think I think that's fine you know I mean personally I think if if people can leave Ukraine that's good because I mean I it's it's it's it's awful and I know people in my family who are very who are politically well connected that left the country uh illegally in wartime because of their good political connections.

I mean, I, not me, I'm not a Ukrainian citizen, but in fact, it was actually I left after they'd left.

I left Ukraine after the members of my family that were legally meant to stay in Ukraine when the war began, they left early on.

And

I found it quite difficult to leave.

So, I mean, what's being discussed now is that there was this

Zelensky 10 days after his big argument with Trump, right?

He they had the new talks in Saudi Arabia, which Zelensky didn't actually participate in.

So it's kind of he went to Saudi Arabia, but he didn't participate in the talks.

So I guess he was

like

Christopher when they went to Italy.

That's right.

He did too much heroin in the hotel.

That's right.

Yeah, in a little cast in his neck or something.

Yeah.

There's some crazy skyscrapers in Saudi Arabia.

Maybe he was sitting in them in Riyadh or something and sort of contemplating.

But

yeah, I mean, they were long negotiations, eight hours.

I translated the thing by one of the diplomats that said that apparently they got really tired during the negotiations and they may have made some big compromises during these negotiations because they got really tired.

I guess it happens.

That's genius.

I mean, I would do, I would sell out Mike Hunter or whoever if you got me tired enough.

After seven hours, come on, guys.

We got to wrap this up.

Yeah, Jesus.

Like, I'll do anything.

Just let him get out of this fucking.

fucking, I want to go outside.

But I mean, really, I mean, I'm not sure what he means by that, because really what happened is that the end of these negotiations was that the Ukrainian delegation agreed to the idea of a ceasefire.

right i mean they were open to the idea of a ceasefire but i mean which is a big contrast their previous rhetoric which is that no ceasefire is possible blah blah blah but it didn't actually there was no they they weren't they didn't agree to a ceasefire they agreed to the idea of a ceasefire and if russia agrees then sure a 30-day ceasefire.

And the hope that was voiced by many Ukrainian diplomats and government officials, and everyone in Ukraine, essentially, that was a nationalist

freak, was that Russia will decline.

They'll say, no, we don't want a 30-day ceasefire.

We want Ukraine out of, you know, no Ukraine in NATO ever, which is the Russian.

diplomatic line, which is we don't want a temporary ceasefire.

We want a

full peace agreement that changes the European security landscape and NATO leaves Ukraine forever.

No more spy bases in Ukraine, which are, you know, New York Times writes about these, the, you know, CIA spy base that they had on the border with Russia in Ukraine.

Anyway, so they were hoping that Russia would tell Trump, fuck you, we're not signing that.

And then Trump will go ballistic and he will give Ukraine nukes, right?

This is the idea.

Yeah.

That they're going to get Trump back on Team Ukraine.

by giving getting him to agree to some kind of agreement that Russia would never agree to, and then telling him, Well, look, Trump, Russia's crazy, you got to support us.

But that didn't happen.

I mean, Russia replied that, like, yeah, look,

this is not enough for us, but we're open to discussing this, but we need to have something more.

And there, uh, uh, this was this has been the past couple days.

And so it's a little bit of a, you know, I mean, the Marco Rubio and every single Western government official before they talked with Russia after these Saudi Arabia talks, they all said, like in unison, the ball is now in Russia's park, or Russia's court.

That's right, lots of balls flooding the Kremlin.

But then they threw it back with a curveball, I guess you can say that, which is the saying that we're fine with this, but we need to have something else.

And obviously,

the two that have been mentioned so far is no mobilization in Ukraine

and something else.

I forgot what.

But it seems likely that Russia will ask, is asking Trump to push on Ukraine more to give these different concessions around NATO, around elections, because Russia is very tired of Zelensky.

They want someone else that they see as being more likely to agree.

I think that Zelensky has basically gone a little bit crazy.

He's an actor.

He's been told for, you know, how many years now that he's like, you know, literally Napoleon, literally...

you know, the Jedis, Luke Skywalker, and so on.

And

he's kind of drunk the Kool-Aid a little bit and he's lost touch with reality.

Plus.

A true true actor.

He's a true actor.

That was always the danger.

Yeah, no, I legitimately,

I've always felt like there's an earnestness to him,

which

is not always a good thing.

Yeah, and I mean, the guy, there's a lot you can say about Zelensky.

He's a very interesting figure, I think, world historically, very postmodern.

And the guy had a TV show.

Where he was the main character, where he became the prime the president of Ukraine.

This was 2018, 2017, and so on, which was being produced by Kolomoyski and so on.

And that he's this amazing teacher that becomes the president of Ukraine who stops corruption and so on and so on.

And then he became the president and this TV show was really popular.

And then he became the president after.

You know,

it's incredible when you think about it, really.

It's incredible.

In the post-Soviet world, we have this term of like political technology.

There's this incredible political technology that

took place with Zelensky.

But

so this is the situation of the moment.

Right now, there's, I mean, there's the opposition in, you know, Trump is in contact with the Ukrainian different political factions.

This is Politico has been writing about it, and other different Western media has been writing about it.

In particular, with like the pro-West, the ex-president Paroshenko, who has quite a large party.

Not that popular.

He's not that popular at all, really.

According to the Pauls, you know, the ex-head of the army, Zeluzhny, he's the most popular, according to most polls.

Zelensky got rid of him at the start of last year because he was getting too popular, essentially.

And also, they could blame

the failure of the counteroffensive on Zaluzhny and so on.

But then apart from those figures, I mean, Zeluzhny is also in contact with different Azov people.

They boast of their good friendship with him.

One of the top Azov guys,

Kratievich, he talked about how he gave Zaluzhny like a rare British colonial knife.

They're really into knives, these guys, like cool knives and knife.

Like a Sykes-Picot fighting knife?

Some shit like that.

Sykes-Picot, I'm the fucking idiot.

A Sykes-Fairbont knife.

Sykes-Picot.

The same guy that did

the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Maybe

the knife.

That's right.

Oh my God.

I have to clarify.

I need to do a pickup at the start of this episode.

On any existing subreddits, no one mentioned the Sykes-Picot fighting knife.

maybe now is the nice thing I've ever said it's the fair but fairburn knife fairburn Sykes fighting knife I'm thinking of maybe it was the knife that Sykes Pico used to carve up the Middle East to carve up and give it out and they carved the map and that's how the knife came out

thank you yeah that makes sense that makes a lot of sense but um Yeah, anyway, so like he meets with Zeushi.

He gave him a knife recently.

Zelushny is the ambassador to the UK now.

But I mean, there's also talk that actually Trump is not much of a fan of Zeluzhny.

Zeluzhny recently came out with some anti-US statement how like Trump is abandoning Europe.

I don't know.

I think everyone's saying that right now.

I'm not so sure how much Trump would worry about that.

But more interestingly, I think, is there's this

faction of...

On the one hand, Budanov, who's the head of the intelligence services in Ukraine,

you know, the Ghur, which is

directory of intelligence and so on.

He's actually in charge of like the Azov Nazi freaks in Ukraine.

Budanov is really like the main kind of patron of these forces since 2022.

And he's been saying stuff that we need to have a ceasefire, otherwise the country will collapse.

He said this,

he reportedly said this a couple months ago.

And then he denied it, but like not really denied it.

And anyway, basically he said this, that unless we have a ceasefire, the Ukrainian state will cease to exist by the end of this year.

And that's a line that, as I said, lots of these Azov guys have been saying as well: that the country is heading towards self-destruction.

Unless we have a ceasefire, we can use this to sort of amp up the army,

get things in order,

put our guys in charge, get rid of this Zelensky idiot, and so on.

And then you have him, and then you also have this interesting guy, David Arakamia, who's a very, very interesting, very strange figure,

who is the head of Zelensky's party in parliament.

He's also got this crazy biography.

He's actually from Russia, but he's like

not like ethnically Russian, seems like some kind of

Caucasian in terms of like the Georgia area.

Anyway, he had a whole, he, he worked in the U.S.

in the 2000s and all these weird tech startup companies, which were investigated by the FBI for massive fraud, but then they called off the investigation.

And then there's all these kind of talk of CIA involvement.

He's working with Microsoft, all these weird tech startup companies that failed, but then emerged from the ashes and so on.

And then he went back to Ukraine in 2013, right as the, you know, Maidan was taking place.

And then he was kind of invisible, but then all of a sudden in 2019, he became like

meteorically rose to power with Zelensky.

No one had really heard of him before.

But he's in charge of Zelensky's parliamentary faction in parliament, which is really important because Zelensky's having lots of trouble with parliament.

Parliament's not really passing his laws, or they are, but with like a very, very, only just scraping through.

The Ukrainian parliament kind of works with, you know, you pay off people, you know, $100,000 to vote for this or not to vote for this and so on.

But in wartime, the money is not really there.

And then also these laws are also unpopular.

And all these parliamentarians, they're thinking about the political future in any elections.

Like, if I vote for this law, you know, giving the mobilization police the right to shoot people, right?

Like, no no one will forget this.

Everyone will hate me.

So they're not voting for stuff.

Arahami is kind of in charge of disciplining them, but he's becoming more and more kind of alienated from Zelensky and more importantly from like Zelensky's right-hand man, Yermak, who's kind of like

the gray cardinal in Ukraine, which Yermak has like lots of hate for him.

as this weird like Russian spy, but he's also become so isolated in wartime as like Zelensky's number one man, maybe more powerful than Zelensky.

He's kind of micromanaging the government and so on.

And the Saro-side people hate this Yermaka.

But basically, Yermak and Arakhamiya are fighting.

Arakhamia went to Trump's inauguration and he's talking with Trump about some kind of ceasefire, essentially.

And he's allied with Budanov, this guy, the Secret Service spook guy who's in charge of all the Azov, right-wing guys, different other weird Nazi groups.

So that seems like a fairly, that's kind of what I'm, I don't know, betting on, but that, that seems quite legitimate.

I think Trump has serious problems with Paroshenko.

Paroshenko was the president when Manafort stuff came out, and Paroshenko was kind of involved in this Manafort stuff coming out in 2016.

Not coming out, but kind of being produced, essentially, as an anti-Trump operation.

Paroshenko is a real kind of Democrat Party guy.

But I think Arahamiya, this guy is a young, weird tech startup freak.

sort of guy sounds very trumpian sounds very trumpian and uh weird sort of spook cia stuff.

So that and weird crazy fraud, like, you know, pyramid.

Yeah,

he's like basically a teal guy.

Exactly, exactly.

It sounds great.

So basically, I mean, this Arak Hamir guy, he has a very important role in the parliament.

As I was saying, I mean, the parliament's not passing Zelensky's laws.

And Arakhamir is in contact with Trump over a ceasefire.

Budanov is in charge of like the neo-Nazi Azov people, and they're they're all kind of in favor of a ceasefire in which they would sort of purge society of any anti-militarist forces, get their, you know, kill some more sort of fifth columnists, as they call them, and probably try and centralize their power in government.

And then you also have the fact that, according to the Ukrainian sort of legislation, Zelensky's constitutional two-term limit has run out.

And he would have to transfer power, unless if there are no elections, he would have to transfer power to the head of parliament or some kind of parliamentary uh national unity government which is something that the paroshenko kind of ex-president liberal nationalist guy has been talking about a lot because paroshenk i mean paroshenko is not that popular but uh as part of some kind of national unity government that would kind of make sense he would be able to get it get back sort of uh this close to power in that sense and then there's the there's the the head of the army there's ilyzhny who's apparently the most popular guy in ukraine according to Paul's But I don't know how much you can trust these Pauls.

I think lots of it is just people really tired of Zelensky.

If you look at Ukrainian social media, there's loads of hatred towards Zelensky.

People are just really, really tired of the current situation where you can't leave and mobilization, kind of press gangs are prowling the streets and shoving you into buses and

beating you to death and all this sort of thing.

tired of the war and they don't want to fight and so on.

So it's a complicated constellation.

But unless, I mean there were these talks in Ukrainian media that Zelensky was proposing to Trump that Zelensky become sort of what they said was like a Cold War style African or Latin American dictator where

the US keeps him in power forever in exchange for which he's like this Cold War frontier state and also he gives the US you know, natural resource benefits.

But that seems like it's not really flown through with Trump.

And Trump seems to want to exit Ukraine.

I think he has very bad associations with Ukraine through Russia Gate and all this stuff.

And they're really into that, like the American,

you know, Republicans and so on.

So it's kind of obvious why, because you know, he got him impeached, right, in 2019.

And that was also because of this phone call with Zelensky, where Zelensky promised that he would look in, he would sort of prosecute the

people responsible for the Manafort shit, right?

And Zelensky said in this phone call, like, yeah, the general prosecutor is totally under me.

He's totally under my control, 100% under my control, and we're going to look into it.

But they didn't look into it.

And then these Manafort era spook people, this guy Trepjak that I wrote about, they actually got back into power in Ukraine.

And so Zelensky didn't fulfill his promise of looking into this shit.

Trump is tired of him.

So I do think that Zelensky's time seems to be numbered, but then there's definitely plenty of time for some kind of crazy false flag type situations.

You know, it was interesting.

During the talks in Saudi Arabia,

there was a huge Ukraine's biggest ever drone attack on Moscow in the war during the Ukraine-US talks in Saudi Arabia.

So there's clearly some kind of idea that we can get Russia to really oppose these Trump

attempts at a peace, and this will annoy Trump, and then Trump will be on our side again.

But at the moment, it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

At the moment, it seems like Trump is intent on peace in Ukraine, getting rid of Zelensky, some kind of elections.

And then you have, I mean, I guess the last thing that I would say is that even though these Azov-type people

want a ceasefire to clean up the country, they are quite worried about elections.

And there was this interesting interview from a few days ago by this important military commander, Kirillo Veres, who's this, he's not in Azov, but he's like allied with Azov.

He's this commander of this drone unit.

He's very popular in the media and the press.

And he was talking about how it's impossible to get back to the, we can't take any territory.

Ukraine's too weak.

So we need to have some kind of ceasefire and sort of reorganize shit.

And we're not making enough drones.

Russia's making way more drones.

But he also had this really interesting thing that he said, which is that if he were Russia, he would probably push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, because this would mean that Ukrainian politics would become more.

But basically, he said there'd be some kind of civil war in Ukraine.

People would start hating military veterans, and there'd be some kind of large-scale civil unrest/slash civil war in Ukraine if there was no longer this external enemy of Russia to sort of unite society.

And he said that in that case, Russia could easily take Ukraine after there's been this kind of civil conflict.

So, he

seeming to imply that, like, we should not have elections, we should have some kind of military government.

He didn't say this explicitly, but this is definitely something that Azov people like to talk about.

Military government with us in charge.

I don't know how likely that is, maybe,

but that in general, I mean, like the liberal nationalist people, they're very worried that like Russia will use hybrid warfare to destabilize Ukraine during elections, meaning that like Ukrainians may vote for some kind of pro-Russian candidate and Russian media will sort of encourage this and so on and so on.

So, it's interesting to see where it'll develop from the future from now.

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess it is anyone's guess, obviously.

When he says they could take Ukraine, what would that actually look like?

Does he mean like literally absorb it as territory?

Because I don't, I've learned my lesson about making predictions more or less, but like I just don't think they would do that, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, like,

I agree in terms of making predictions.

It's a very, very dangerous game.

But look, I mean, so the whole thing before

2022, right, was this whole Ukrainian society, the whole big question was, will the Minsk agreements be implemented?

And, like, the basic

sort of question of that was

the Minsk agreements would involve the return of eastern Ukraine controlled by like pro-Russian separatists, however you want to call them, into Ukraine's political world.

And importantly, elections there would take place before the Ukrainian military takes control of that.

This was an important part of the misagreements, which would mean that like pro-Russian, anti-EU, anti-NATO figures would win these elections.

And then already the Ukrainian electoral field was such that the pro-Western parties were not that popular.

They got like 20%, 30% of the vote, at most 50%, but generally less.

And like the most, like the party that the Atlantic Council supports, right?

This is the Golos party, voice, they get like 5%.

They're very unpopular.

This was actually, this is the Fukuyama supportive party, actually.

They were headed by this singer,

Svetoslav Pakarchuk, and he actually went to study with Fukuyama in Stanford when he got tired of politics back in like 2019 or so.

And Fukuyama stated that he wished that Fakarchuk could become the president instead of Zelensky, because Zelensky is a Russian agent.

But that didn't happen.

Vakarchuk is a bit of a freak.

He's just like a, he's a really shitty sort of like cold play style, like, but imagine that, but like nationalist sort of thing.

Quite popular, I guess.

Like.

His early songs were kind of all right, actually.

He played in Russia a lot as well.

It's like this usual sort of thing.

What kind of music was it?

I mean,

it's like imagine cold play i guess like that his early songs were kind of a bit more indie sort of thing and they were kind of some of them kind of cool uh so like yeah so like modern modern narina rock is yeah you guys should play one of one of his songs uh i can send you one of his songs to play uh oh yeah like

uh like for instance the like the song like strilliai which is like shoot which was this being and azov kind of used the song but it's like a pop but cold play style

But he was not that popular.

No one really wants this crazy, like, neoliberal nationalism thing.

And so then the whole feel was that if we allow these territories to return, people will vote for like the electoral balance will be such that we won't even be able to have any influence on Ukrainian politics.

We'll have these like anti-NATO parties.

They'll be in charge.

They already have lots of vote anyway, but without these millions of Eastern Ukrainian voters.

And if they return, then it's over for us.

So, I mean, there's this big fear of democracy, ironically, among these liberal nationalist NGO types.

There's this quote as well, for instance.

I mean, like, there was the...

The head of Internews, which is this media company sponsored by USAID and the Renaissance Foundation, Konstantin Kurt.

and he, like for instance, last year, he was pushing for a law to outlaw or ban Telegram and regulate social media.

And he said, to avoid being accused of obstructing freedom of speech, in quotation marks, you know, all that stuff that leftists love to talk about.

We need to refer to European practices where they know how to encourage technological platforms to cooperate.

So they're very like, they think freedom of speech sucks.

It's leftist, right?

I mean, they, and they, before 2022, 2022, they, I mean, there was this large-scale kind of disenfranchisement of eastern Ukrainians because they were internally displaced and they weren't able to vote in elections.

And this was, you know,

quite a large chunk of the electoral landscape in Ukraine.

But these,

I wrote stuff about this.

This was, lots of people wrote about this, open democracy and

Western media as well.

where the most kind of anti-NATO parts of Ukrainian society weren't able to vote.

And this was supported by these, you know,

Tsarocide forces, as they're called in Ukraine.

And if there are elections now, there's this fear that, yeah, we'll go back to that.

And then people will vote for someone that wants, you know, basically to sort of chill.

We don't need to join NATO.

It's not going to happen anyway.

And let's just sort of come to some kind of agreement with Russia.

We don't have to like them, but we don't want to fight with them forever.

Something like that.

And that's that big fear, basically.

I don't know.

I guess

depending on what I think about that guy's music, I might start a forwarders campaign to elect him.

Though if I don't like it, I mean, I'll just stay, I'll keep uninvolved.

Well, because he was the other option other than Zelensky.

Like in 2018, the Ukrainian oligarchs were like trying to figure out who should they get to replace the president, like because Paroshenko was taking too much shit.

and getting too powerful.

And the pro-Western Pinchuk, more pro-Western anyway, he was trying to prepare Bakarchuk for this role.

And he was like really glazing him on his media, his TV channels.

But it just didn't really work out.

Either Bakarchuk didn't want to or he just wasn't popular enough.

And then Kolomoyski decided, well, that's a great idea.

And he started trying to prepare Zelensky, who was already a well-known comedian for the role of president, you know, and so on.

So, I mean, maybe Bakarchuk has a chance.

Probably not.

He's kind of stupid.

This is kind of his problem.

He doesn't really have, and he doesn't seem to have that many ambitions, ambitions really i mean he's he's into music and he's into like i don't know fukuyama i guess but he's he doesn't seem that enthusiastic i guess the only thing like more temperamental and like horrifying on a personal basis than an actor is a musician absolutely like i i am terrified of people who are good at music for the most part absolutely

that they're so they're so maladroit at human communication they have to learn how to do music exactly exactly or can't you tell me what you think why do you have to sing about it can't you just tell me what you want in simple words like yeah for sure yeah yeah

um i guess to close this out and this is i get yeah once again a fairly broad open-ended question but we touched on the atlantic council and the uh Western sponsors of a lot of these forces a lot.

I was wondering, just from your perspective, as someone who's much closer to this on the other end of uh

these western institutions of the atlanticist designs where i mean where do you see them going next after this and i guess how do you how do you see them characterizing this because i i am very curious to see how they frame this in coming years i think it will

that they're going to go for like a stabbed in the back type thing with Trump and kind of bank on Trump continuing to slide in popularity.

And I think that they'll try to sort of make anti-interventionism a uniquely Trump thing going forward.

Yeah, I think I agree with you.

Right now, you know, you have this whole European thing of saying that we're going to continue the glorious legacy of Atlanticism without the U.S.

And we're going to continue supporting Ukraine.

But now, I mean, they keep on saying this, but it's obvious they're not actually going to follow through.

And then they came out recently, and, you know, Macron and Starmer said, well, we're not going to put troops on the ground in Ukraine after they sort of said they would.

And it's clear that they won't.

I mean, the UK has one,

like one regiment or whatever, right?

And all of the tanks don't work.

They don't have the capacity to follow through with these promises.

So the irony is that really, I mean, if Kamala had been elected, it's probably likely she would have been trying to pull out of Ukraine as well, really.

I mean, and I mean, Biden as well, and he was never committed to going further to do what is necessary for Ukraine to win.

I mean, even what that would involve, who knows?

But

he was always

limiting the,

there was a lot of military aid, obviously, to Ukraine, but he also was very clear that the U.S.

was not going to get involved directly, that they were not going to...

they're going to keep it within certain limits.

So it's kind of ironic because, I mean, I think that what Trump is doing now, it would have probably been done by a Democratic administration as well, probably in a more,

you know, kind of

in a less extravagant, more, I guess, maybe hypocritical and like double-speak sort of way, whereas Trump is just saying,

saying what it actually, what actually is happening very directly and bluntly.

But I think in the future, yeah, I mean, there's this speculation that it's part of this attempt.

Well, speculation, I mean, this is said openly by many, by like Marco Rubio and so on, that we have to orient towards China.

And, you know, there's like the Palantir guy that that that freak you know like that that weird young annoying uh

what Alex Karp or do you are you talking about the uh weapon Palmer Lucky the

Palmer Lucky Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's like a teal guy, and I would be sure that

I'm almost certain that Palantir is some sort of businessman

with

Andrell.

That's right, yeah.

I hate that guy, both because of how he looks and like what he says, but also like

I wouldn't call myself like an expert on weapons.

I would just, I'm interested in them because I played Ace Combat when I was a kid and still do.

But like, his weapons fucking suck.

Like, I'm sure you know, they're constantly being jammed by like, by Russia.

Russia jams them incredibly easy.

He acts like he has cracked the code of like loadering munitions.

No, you haven't.

Fucking everyone who who worked for like McDonnell Douglas or fucking whoever 40 years ago made better weapons than you.

The first cruise missiles we ever made to be fired from B-52s

are less shitty than what you make now.

I fucking hate, I hate him.

I hated stupid fucking loitering munitions.

I hated stupid fucking cruise missiles that have like a 20-pound warhead.

Yeah, anyone can make something go 200 fucking miles if there's nothing in the warhead, you asshole.

Oh, God, fuck

Yeah.

I mean, there was this interesting interview that from a couple of months ago that I wrote a thing about where he was talking about how, you know, it's this stupid sort of Silicon Valley like genius, like we just need more geniuses to fix the world and then it's going to be fine.

And he's saying basically, we're going to have these epic mega drones.

I mean, not mega, but that will solve the war in Ukraine.

And the idea being that we need to save money.

There's too much money being spent on defense.

And that money needs to go to me.

And I'm going to make these amazing drones that will be cheaper, but will actually be more effective.

And it's kind of stupid where it's just, I mean, the way that drone warfare works in Ukraine is that the number of drones is really important.

You need to have lots of drones because most of them will get jammed, right,

by electronic warfare.

So you need to have lots of drones and Russia has been able to produce a lot more drones.

As I was saying, this Veres guy, head of the drone, like the most kind of well-known drone guy in Ukraine, well, one of the most well-known drone guys.

I mean, they're all talking about this.

Russia has so many more drones.

And that's why they're sort of winning the drone, the drone war.

And Ukraine often has

this idea where it's like, we're going to have these genius high-tech drones, and they're going to win against the Russian orcs that have like a billion shitty drones made out of like, you know, shit and like, you know, sticks.

But the reality is that the Russian drones are pretty effective, you know, technologically advanced as well, but you need to have more drones.

And there's this luck Palmerlucky idea.

I think it's very kind of this Trumpian sort of quick fix sort of shit, right?

Whereas we're going to have some smart ideas, some good deals, and some, you know, some of Palmer's amazing, you know, what's it like 5D porn Oculus Rifts type of situations.

They're going to solve, they're going to just solve the war.

But obviously, I mean, warfare is a lot more, I mean, like military organization,

the sort of larger strategy, and also, I mean, you know, manpower.

And it's not really just solved by these little amazing toys.

But so I think that's

an idea that they have.

They can sort of semi-withdraw from Ukraine, but still maybe keeping it in their orbit

as like a semi-neutral, but also pro-American country.

And this genius technology will help them with that, which seems unlikely to me.

But, you know, there are some other that say that Trump is fine with Ukraine just being kind of a neutral, even, you know, Russian sort of satellite.

Who knows?

And then, but, but then, with now that they can focus more on other things, they can focus and pivot towards China.

And Palmer Lucky is also talking a lot about China.

Not that Palmer Lucky kind of decides things, but I think it's kind of illustrative, I guess, of this

kind of good bellwether.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, it sounds like.

So, I mean, that's, and I think it's interesting.

I'm sure that the Atlanticist type people will be trying to sort of drag the US back into Ukraine through some kind of

stunts, who knows how, maybe.

But it's in any case, I think like the two scenarios are either Ukraine becomes some kind of neutral, chaotic political arena where there are lots of forces pushing towards like detente with Russia,

but also lots of forces against that, like it was before 2022, essentially.

Or there's some kind of large or the war just just continues.

And then, I mean,

Russia has better chances for a lot of reasons.

And this could lead to like a much larger scale Ukrainian defeat, collapse.

It's hard to say.

I mean, you don't want to make any predictions.

And the war could go on for a long time as well.

But also, I mean, then it's the question of how much will the US be supporting this war either as well.

And, I mean, how they'll frame it in the future.

I think, yeah, like some sort of this stab in the back narrative,

but also just forget about it.

I think they'll just forget about it, honestly.

I think that's, that's how they do it.

You know, they just, they just say, well, yes, it was the Ukrainians' fault.

They didn't fight well enough.

We helped them as much as we could, but then it was stupid Trump, stupid Ukrainians.

I think that's how they'll spin it, honestly.

And who cares about them anyway?

A bunch of, you know, Slavic subhumans anyway.

I think that's how, and that's what kind of fucks me up.

I think after supporting this so much and pretending to care so much about this country that they found out about yesterday or whatever.

I mean, I'm talking especially about the sort of liberal

demographic voters in the U.S.

or whatever.

But then they'll just forget about it, just like with every other war.

I think that's a totally likely scenario, honestly.

Yeah, no, I mean,

that is the other thing that I've picked up watching them.

It would be great if people internalize their failures such that they go, okay, we're done with politics.

Fuck it.

We're going to go back to making TV or whatever the fuck we did before.

But they unfortunately do not let things get them down.

And they will move on to the next thing and the next thing after that.

I'm sure,

I think you're completely right that like

those Palmer Lucky and other teal-associated types are a very good bellwether for what is next.

And yeah, no, I'm sure it'll be China stuff.

I don't know what that will look look like but i'm sure it will be something similar where you're an asshole and you're a hypocrite and you you know it actually invalidates anything that you've said about israel that you won't stand with taiwan or whatever the next thing is i think the philippines yeah no militia

sense like in terms of yeah very similar to ukraine this kind of very corrupt country that's totally infiltrated by like american military and intelligence services and sort of shaping them up to be this future battlefield.

But

it's very sad, you know.

I mean, if you think about the longer term, it's this very, it's kind of this final stage of, you know, what they call it like Vietnamization, right?

Where it's like we need to, we can't be involved in these wars directly.

We need to sort of give it over to the to our allies/slash proxies, and they can do the killing and the dying and so on, and we'll, we'll be, we'll be out of it.

And it's, and it's, it's, it's sad, really, how this is not recognized, I think, by significant portions of the

American left.

I mean, you know, there's plenty of people that see it how it is as well, but

also, I mean, even, I guess, liberal critics of, say, like the Vietnam War or whatever, or the Iraq war or whatever.

But then they,

and something totally obvious is happening that's also, you know, incredibly

sad waste of human lives for these objectives that are that are just so vague and so based on I guess you know national you know this fear of appearing weak in the world and of maintaining I guess you know US hegemony and this in this transforming world where there's not really a need anymore well I mean not a need but there's not really the possibility for this to exist I was thinking about this the other day how

you know the most like overused uh popular thing to say in the last few years is this idea of like nothing ever happens and that's you know obviously not true things happen all the time the unfortunate reality is

everything is set up especially with this v post-vietnamization system nothing ever ends yeah and even when you know someone it's after someone's time in the sun so to speak is done and they lose the privilege of anglo-american institutions fucking up everything in their country and

pushing them further and further towards death and destruction.

And it's the next person's turn.

The same people will be involved in the same institutions and the same ideas and tactics.

But something did happen before that.

And

people died.

Things

lives were destroyed.

Countries had their histories

forever altered.

But none of the people involved will ever fucking go away.

And in fact, they will be in politics until they're 120.

Absolutely.

I mean, yeah, I was just recently in Vietnam and I was just reading as well about this.

And it's just, it's really, it's really crazy.

And it's incredibly sad how, you know, people that, you know, killed thousands or hundreds of people just personally, right?

Different soldiers or generals and so on.

And they just never faced any consequences whatsoever.

And that's just how it is.

And with politicians that will continue to have this whole, you know, self-aggrandizing,

sort of valiant view of themselves as, you know, saving the world,

it's pretty crazy.

But I mean, you know, I guess it was in Vietnam.

It's, it's nice.

The country's doing well.

That's cool.

It's a bit of an exception, really, but it does happen.

Yeah.

But, you know, sad.

Yeah.

That's the thing is like they got a conclusion.

Not that they got off light.

They experienced some of the worst actions of America during the Cold War, but there was a conclusion there.

And unfortunately, that is something that is absent in a lot of the rest of the world now.

You know what's fucking sad is one of the only pieces of media where they acknowledge both the idea of American war criminals in Vietnam besides William Calley,

both as something that existed and something that is directly something you interact with and part of the plot, and it is accepted that it's a good idea for them to face justice.

It was Metal Gear Solid ground zeros.

It was a fucking video game with like five missions that last like 40 minutes.

That's the only fucking piece of media I remember that even has that concept in it.

And well, well, how did they, what, could you sentence them yourself?

Or I I haven't played this game.

How did it work?

You go to like a Romana clef of Gitmo and

you kill them.

You could also abduct them, but like

the guy, your guy who's like on the radio with you wants you to kill them.

He's like, no, we need to kill them.

Wow.

So you kill the American soldiers responsible for what, like, burning, yeah, but

killing and raping a village.

Wow, incredible.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, no, I definitely agree with you.

Nothing ever ends.

And I think with Ukraine, I think it's going to just continue in some, maybe not full-scale war, but, you know, as the popular term is, this hybrid war, right?

With this constant threat of a new war erupting.

And, you know,

there's also just, there are so many people that are involved in this, you know, that have had...

that have fought in the war and become really, you know, I guess radicalized.

Many people in the army want an end to the war as well, actually.

Many people in the army are very tired of the war.

But there are many as well that have their friends have been killed and so on, or relatives of people killed in the war, who also

many of them also want an end to the war, but many of them don't.

Many of them, you know, want it to continue and are very, very committed to this.

So I think it's just going to be smoldering and festering away.

And you don't really have any groups in Ukraine that have a clear vision of where to take the country and in some sort of progressive sense that would keep people minimally happy and a clear idea as well.

This is the thing with Zelensky.

He just didn't have a clear idea and he didn't really know what he was doing.

He was kind of reacting to short-term sort of things.

He would try to do something good, but then the sort of the nationalist opposition would protest and they would stop him.

And then he would back off and he would go the other direction.

And so there's not really any forces, but a clear idea.

This is the big problem, I think.

Yeah.

And of course, of those people who,

you know, were radicalized, and yeah, yeah, you make an important distinction that a lot of people, they got sent in the other direction of being against this war continuing in any future wars, but they have more weapons than they have ever had at this point.

Yeah.

Just kicking around.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, yeah, I mean, there's lots of...

Every other day you'll see some story was like, you know, a guy throws a grenade into a crowd or like into a neighbor's apartment, kills two people, or like into, you know, at his girlfriend or whatever and kills her.

Or, you know, I mean, yesterday or the day before, there was an assassination of one of the most well-known nationalist sort of activists, as they're called, in Ukraine, in OSA,

Dimian Ganul.

And he was killed by

a military man, a sergeant who deserted from the army.

And he just, there's a video of him walking up to this nationalist freak who's a total, total.

total piece of shit.

But he walks up to him and he just shoots him and he's on the ground.

He just walks up to him again and shoots him in the the head just close range no no reaction whatsoever and then just walks away calmly but there's so many people with guns.

There's so many there was an interesting story a couple two years ago or so back these guys were smuggling all these ammunition from

military guys and then they got in a firefight with the police.

They killed the policeman.

They were on the run.

They got captured.

So I mean yeah absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Grim things ahead.

Well, I mean the only positive thing i can say as we close out is um i don't know it'll be harder for us to get one over on china i think it sounds great not that we necessarily got one over on russia but you know even more difficult to get one oh harder yeah yeah yeah yeah i agree i agree i thought you were saying it now it's easier for us to turn to china and now we're gonna them up

no no no no no no

yeah yeah i get you i get you i get you yeah yeah well it seems like things are pretty chaotic that's good you know

things are going very strangely in the halls of power.

That can only be good, right?

I hope so.

Although they have those buttons, the scary buttons.

That's not good.

So who knows?

Who knows?

Yeah.

Anyway, thanks a lot for having me on, Felix.

I really enjoyed my time on here.

I hope I didn't talk too much, too many names.

No.

My absolute pleasure.

I am really glad we got to do this.

If people want to read you,

where can they check you out?

And yeah, if you have anything else you want to plug.

Yeah, I mean, i've got my my sub stack uh events in ukraine i definitely uh recommend subscribing to that i put out two articles a week sometimes three and uh yeah i write elsewhere as well but you can all it's mainly mainly on there yeah all the best felix thank you so much my absolute pleasure thank you again and uh yeah we'll have links to all of that hopefully hopefully we can do this again thank you yeah thank you so much

to sleep

a trunk of a shy

me.

I'm the Lord

still.